

Okay, so we know the gutter (or inside) margin on bound books has to be larger than the outer margin, but how much? Let’s take a 6″ x 9″ book as an example.

That inside margin is referred to as the “gutter” margin. We even have a language for referring to this inside margin, whether it’s the left side of the page (right-hand, or odd-numbered pages) or the right (left-hand, even-numbered pages). They curve in toward the binding, don’t they?īecause your printed book isn’t going to open completely flat, we always leave more room on the inside margins of our pages. That’s because the pages of a book, when you’re reading it, aren’t flat the way a single piece of paper is. That’s understandable if all you’ve ever done with your word processor or layout program is create single-page documents or short reports that are stapled or clipped together.īut when your pages are going to end up bound into a book, vertical centering isn’t the best way to go. In most cases, people seem to want to put the text in the middle of the page. This refers to the tall column of type that makes up your text pages. Once you’ve decided what your book size will be, the next order of business is to position the text block on the page.

I’m not going to deny that book designers are detail freaks. This has to do with page margins-how to do them right and how not to do them wrong. Today, I want to look at one of the most common of these mistakes, and show you easy ways to avoid it. For instance, last year I was judging the annual book competition for a local publishing group, and I found formatting and book construction mistakes in many of the books produced by amateur publishers. I talk to a lot of authors and look at hundreds of self-published books, and the ones that are problematic jump out at me. Longstanding habits of readers and accepted trade practices have come to dictate that we follow these formatting guides unless we have a pretty good reason not to. It’s important to stay within formatting conventions because printed books have existed for a long while. When authors decide to format their own books, they don’t pick the best book layout. Need a Book Layout Template for MS Word or Mac?.
